On her third day of testimony, Jennifer Pan cried as she described her mother’s last breath.

She told the court she had been tied to the banister on the upper floor of her house on Nov. 8, 2010, when she heard a series of gunshots and her mother screaming from the basement.

When Pan called 9-1-1 at 10:32 p.m., after the three intruders had left, she said she could hear her dad moaning and then running outside to the street. The last sound from her mother had been “an exhale … I had a feeling in my heart that was her last breath.”

Pan’s mother died, but after spending days in a coma her father recovered. The Crown alleges the home invasion was fake, a plot by Pan to have her parents killed when her father forbade her from seeing her boyfriend.

Pan, 28, has admitted she had initially tried to have her father killed, but that she later changed her mind and wanted herself killed instead. She said she felt suicidal over all the lies she had told her family, and over her boyfriend seeing someone else.

She is charged with first-degree murder in the death of her mother, Bich Ha Pan, and attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder in the shooting of her father, Hann Pan. Daniel Wong, the boyfriend, along with Lenford Crawford, Eric Carty, and David Mylvaganam all face the same charges.

As Pan tearfully recounted the night her parents were shot, having to pause occasionally to take deep breaths and wipe her eyes, the other four men watched stone-faced from the prisoners boxes. The Crown alleges Mylvaganam was one of the three intruders and that Carty may have been present, but Crawford and Wong both have alibis of being at work that night.

Earlier in her testimony, Pan was asked to explain the dozens upon dozens of text messages and phone calls she made on her two cellphones in the hours before the intruders arrived.

She said she had been trying to collect the money to pay a “cancellation fee” of $8,500 to a man known as “Homeboy” — who the Crown says is Crawford — after she changed her mind about having herself killed for $10,000. The Crown alleges the $10,000 was the contract for killing her parents.

On Wednesday, she told the court that a text she received on Nov. 8 referring to “game time” just meant her plan to pay the cancellation fee.

Many of Pan’s text messages read out in court were innocuous, playful exchanges with Wong, although the two weren’t dating at the time. Another friend of hers came over around 7 p.m. for a “movie night,” and then left around 9.

But that evening Pan said she started getting calls from a person she didn’t know, asking her about the money. She said she didn’t have it.

Then shortly after 10 p.m., while she was in her room on the phone with a friend, Pan said she heard her mother, who was in the living room, call for her father, who had been sleeping. She said the tone was “worried and disturbed,” so she knew something was wrong.

Soon she was confronted by an armed man who tied her hands behind her back and demanded money. She told him there were bills in her diary, and said her wallet was in a baby blue Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen backpack.

Pan said she was then led downstairs, where her parents were on the couch. But when the intruders couldn’t find her parents’ wallets, they enlisted Pan to do it for them. She said she led them back upstairs to her father’s room to try to find his wallet.

It was then that she was tied to the banister, and could hear her parents being led away.

“I could hear my mom call out for me, ‘I want to be with my daughter, please bring me to my daughter,’” she said.

She said she asked the intruders why she was being kept separate from her parents, and was told, “You co-operated.”

Shortly before the gunshots, Pan said she heard the men telling her parents they were liars. Then she heard her mom scream, and take that “last breath.”

Pan was asked how she dialed 9-1-1 with her hands tied behind her back. She said she slipped her phone out of her back pocket and dialed by feeling around on the keypad.

Earlier in the trial, her father testified that he had seen Pan quietly speaking with the men during the invasion.

When Pan was at the hospital later that night, she said police officers were asking her to come to the police station to make a statement, but she didn’t want to go.

“They kept telling me, ‘It’s very important that we find the people who did this to your family.’”

The trial will now break for three weeks before continuing with the defence’s evidence.